Advance: DARKEST HOUR
Directing: B+
Acting: A-
Writing: B+
Cinematography: B+
Editing: B
Gary Oldman has long been impressively chameleonic as an actor, disappearing in roles from Dracula to Zorg in The Fifth Element to Sirius Black in the Harry Potter franchise to Commissioner Gordon in the Christopher Nolan Batman movies – among a great many others. But he has never disappeared quite so completely as he does as Winston Churchill in <i>Darkest Hour</i>, a truly great performance in – well, okay, it’s a very good, if not great, movie.
It’s easy for a performance to get weighed down – so to speak – or distracted by the massive amount of prosthetics Oldman wears here, reportedly weighing half his own weight. This transformation alone, really, should garner <i>Darkest Hour</i> on Oscar for Best Makeup, because from the moment he appears on the screen, you don’t even realize you’re looking at Gary Oldman. Granted, Churchill was Britain’s Prime Minister from 1940 to 1945 and again from 1951 to 1955 (this movie focuses on the first stretch), and he died in 1965, so I’m not sure it means much for me to say I really felt like I was looking at Winston Churchill. And some could argue quite easily that John Lithgow did a better job of portraying him in the Netflix series The Crown in its first season last year – he certainly had better enunciation in his delivery. A quick search for the audio of any Winston Churchill speech, however, quickly reveals that Oldman’s is the more realistic one, adding one more element to the astonishing way in which this consummate actor completely transcends any limitations put on him by this production.
That is to say, Gary Oldman alone makes Darkest Hour essential viewing, even if the movie overall is imperfect. I still use the word “imperfect” with some hesitation, because it is also thoroughly entertaining from the start, mesmerizing from the opening frame, and its contrivances play on the audience’s emotions in all the ways they come to the movies specifically for. Getting to the multiple layers of critical appraisal is one thing, but if you enjoy historical biopics in general, movies made for adults, then this is definitely for you.
Now, to call Darkest Hour “Oscar Bait” is both on the nose and an understatement. It’s a period piece set in Britain with a famous actor in the lead giving a stellar performance – anyone with an eye on the coming Oscar race quite rightly places Gary Oldman as the current front runner for Best Actor. It’s early enough, though, that his momentum could still falter, although given the current slate of competitors it seems unlikely. I feel so strongly about this other category that I’ll mention it again, though: this movie deserves Best Makeup. Specifically, Kazuhiro Tsuji as Gary Oldman’s prostethic makeup and hair designer.
There are other actors in this movie, of course, and the two other standouts are women: Kristin Scott Thomas as Clementine Churchill (although her apparent role of “woman who keeps her powerful husband grounded” seems slightly problematic); and Lily James (seen earlier this year in Baby Driver) as Elizabeth Layton, Churchill’s personal secretary. There’s also Ben Mendelsohn (now perhaps best known as the Imperial Commander Orson Krennic in last year’s Rogue One: A Star Wars Story) as the only slightly stuttering King George VI. The presentation of the initially strained relationship between Britain’s king at the time and its new Prime Minister Churchill is much more subtle than the movie is overall, making it one of its most compelling relationships.
And, indeed, most of the rest of Darkest Hour, which details the first couple of weeks after Churchill first became Prime Minister, engages little with subtlety. For a movie of this sort, however, it strikes all the right notes for giving its audience what it wants; few people who aren’t professional critics but have an interest are going to have any complaints. And to be sure, this movie, as directed by Joe Wright (Pride & Prejudice, Atonement), looks at a rather fascinating time in history – at the very beginning of World War II, when the U.S. was studiously trying to remain neutral, honestly a rather shameful (among many) points in U.S. history. A brief scene can say a lot, such as when Churchill makes a phone call to U.S. President Franklin, practically begging for assistance, and getting none.
Darkest Hour certainly provides a lot of uncomfortable things to consider in retrospect. The focus of this story is on Churchill’s ultimate decision whether or not to engage in peace negotiations with Hitler, something he resists with all his might from the beginning. It seems obvious in retrospect that he clearly made the right decision to fight rather than acquiesce to anything Hitler wanted, but the uncomfortable truth is that no one knew this for certain in 1940 – and how do we gauge any similar decisions that might be made by world leaders today? Churchill is at times characterized here as a guy who seems to many like a babbling lunatic, bringing uncomfortable visions of the current American president. Churchill, by contrast, came down on the side of hard, if brutal, logic in the end – a man of integrity in the face of a world crisis, an important distinction.
It was, of course, Britain’s handling of the Dunkirk situation that brought things around for them from the start. One has to wonder what the deal is with the sort of “Dunkirk renaissance” that occurred in 2016 – this is the third movie this year whose story is either all about or hinges on the Dunkirk evacuation. Their Finest, about the making of a British movie about the Dunkirk evacuation starring an American actor in an attempt to persuade the U.S. to get involved, was released in May. Christopher Nolan’s much-talked about Dunkirk, all of its action set in the thick of it, came out in July. Darkest Hour, which features the leaders in Britain making the decisions that set the evacuation in motion – most notably calling on the civilian boats to cross the English Channel to assist – is the best of these three films, doing the best at delivering what it promises. (Incidentally, Joe Wright’s own Atonement had its own sequence set in the thick of the Dunkirk evacuation, which multiple people have said was far more realistic than the entirety of Christopher Nolan’s film.)
World War II is so ingrained in our pop culture psyches, from entertainment alone, it’s easy to oversimplify what a cataclysmic time it was – and the difficulty of the decisions the people in charge had to make. Gary Oldman plays Winston Churchill as a bit of a blowhard, but a man of conscience. How do you live with sacrificing four thousand soldiers in order to save three hundred thousand? It’s cold blooded math, and there is merit to his argument that great nations that fall rise again, but those that willingly subjugate themselves do not. One of Darkest Hour’s many rather contrived scenes involves Churchill shocking the public by taking his first-ever ride on a London Underground train, to ask random citizens their opinion: would they fight the Nazis even when the odds are stacked against them? You can imagine how they all answer – but, for this movie’s purposes, it does the trick, and quickly gets to the heart of Britain’s national mood at the time. “Never surrender” sounds like a cliché now, but in the context of 1940 Britain, it was a notion that had real weight, and as such this movie does too.
Is that Gary Oldman or Winston Churchill himself? I can't tell!
Overall: B+